Match to Flame – 58

posted on November 28, 2017

Crazy Harry had long been the repository in the strip for the more outré ideas and situations. Whether it was living in his locker and playing frozen pizzas on his stereo, battling the Eliminator at Space Invaders, or inviting ET and Carl Sagan to the Star Trek Convention that he and the school computer would hold, Crazy was definitely the natural born outlier in the strip. He thrived near the boundaries. Crazy also allowed me to tap into the popular zeitgeist such as the rise of video games. In fact, a Space Invaders video game would even become a character in the strip. Not only was Crazy a video game wizard, but he soon encountered a rival wiz called the Eliminator whose identity was masked by a dinged space helmet. (Spoiler alert! Crazy would one day end up marrying the Eliminator. Even I never saw that one coming. Yoiks!) Their ongoing rivalry would often stretch the stories for a couple of weeks or more. The longer story arcs proved to be very comfortable for Crazy, but never more so than when he decided to come out of the closet, or at least from out in front of the closet mirror, and announce to the world that he was an air guitar player. The genesis for that came from a notice on a rock club wall.